Elected President Joe Biden on Saturday nominated members of his science team. He says ‘science will always be at the forefront of my government’ and raises the post of scientific adviser to the cabinet level – first a White House.
Biden said the scientists “will ensure that everything we do is based on science, facts and the truth.”
A pioneer in the mapping of the human genome – the “book of life” – is at the same time director of the Office of Scientific and Technological Policy and advisor on science. Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was the lead author of the first article that revealed the details of the human genome. He would be the first life scientist to have the job in the White House. Its predecessor is a meteorologist.
Accepting his nomination, Lander said ‘the opportunities we face and the challenges we face are greater than ever before’, but stressed that ‘no nation is better equipped’ to meet these challenges. , because no nation is so diverse. “No one can increase America in this regard,” Lander said. “But we must not only make sure that everyone is sitting at the table, but also a place at the laboratory bench.”
Princeton is dr. Alondra Nelson, who Mr. Biden elected deputy head of scientific policy, also stressed the importance of expanding opportunities in the field of STEM. “As a black women’s researcher, I’m very aware of who’s missing in these rooms,” said Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequality, about her career.
Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer from the California Institute of Technology, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the MIT vice president for professor of research and geophysics, Maria Zuber, will lead the external scientific advisory board. Lander holds the post during the Obama administration. Zuber said he hopes to “restore confidence in science and pursue breakthroughs that benefit all people.”
The president-elect also said on Friday that he would retain the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the human genome project. Biden also nominates two leading female scientists as co-chair of the President’s Board of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Collins, in an email, called Lander “brilliant, visionary, extraordinarily creative and very effective at coveting others.”
“I predict he will have a profound transformation on American science,” Collins said.
The post of director of science and technology policy requires confirmation from the Senate.
Scientific organizations were also quick to praise Lander and the promotion of the science post.
“The increase of (the scientific adviser) to the presidency is a clear indication that the government intends to involve scientific expertise in every policy discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science world’s largest general, said. scientific society.
Lander, also a mathematician, is a professor of biology at Harvard and MIT, and his work has been mentioned nearly half a million times in the scientific literature, one of the most among scientists. He has won numerous science awards, including a “genius” MacArthur Society and a breakthrough award, and he is one of Pope Francis’ scientific advisers.
Lander said in conversations that an opportunity to declare science is his ‘Achilles’ heel ‘:’ I love teaching and more than that, I firmly believe that this is the most important impact I can make, no matter what I do in my own scientific career. what the world is ever going to do through my students. ‘
Elected Vice President Kamala Harris said she was particularly excited about the government’s pressure to increase science because of her education. Harris said her mother, an endocrinologist, taught according to the scientific method and taught her daughters that it is “not a failure” to reevaluate a hypothesis “if the facts do not agree.”
“President Biden and I will not only listen to science, but we will invest in it.”